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VICTORIA — As the opinion polls tighten, the New Democrats intend to spend the last phase of the election campaign reminding voters how this “time for a change” thing got started in the first place.

Opposition parties always pitch the need for a change of government. But as the New Democrats maintain, one can specify the exact moment when that notion began to plague the B.C. Liberals.

July 23, 2009. Premier Gordon Campbell and Finance Minister Colin Hansen announced that the provincial sales tax would be harmonized with its federal goods and services counterpart.

“The single biggest thing we can do to improve B.C.’s economy,” they called it, never mind that the Liberals had mentioned harmonization only as something not on the radar screen in the campaign that secured them a third of office just 10 weeks previously.

“The last thing British Columbians expected from the Campbell government, which had made personal income tax relief — and household tax relief — so central to its vision, was a tax shift that would increase their tax burden, especially in the midst of a recession,” wrote the premier’s then chief of staff Martyn Brown in a devastating analysis-cum-mea-culpa self-published last summer.

“The HST was an issue of such broad public importance that it should never have been imposed without any prior consultation, let alone only weeks after an election, and in direct contradiction to the governing party’s stated position. It represented such a significant shift in the tax burden from businesses to individuals that it was not on a scale that would have ever been right to impose it as a done deal.”

No mandate. A betrayal of the electorate in general, the government’s own supporters in particular. And that was just the beginning.

The Liberals botched every aspect the harmonized sales tax. They had no communications strategy at the outset, then when they got one it was predicated (remember the stick-persons?) on the presumption that the public needed the equivalent of hand puppets to understand the HST.

They misjudged until too late, how opponents could activate the province’s dormant initiative and recall legislation to sustain public anger and defeat the tax.

The finance ministry squandered the better part of four years implementing the HST then getting rid of it, leaving little time for more productive endeavours on the taxation and fiscal policy front.

Even if one believes that value-added taxation on the goods and services model is the surer route to value-added economic development, there was no overlooking how Liberal ineptitude had poisoned the well against any further discussion of sales tax reform for a generation.

Arrogance compounded by incompetence. In my 30 years writing about politics and government in B.C., this was the worst handled-public policy initiative I’ve seen — and I covered Bill Vander Zalm on abortion and Glen Clark on fast ferries.

As Rich Coleman, the deputy premier and co-chair of the Liberal re-election campaign remarked recently, “one could write a book” about how not to do public policy based on his government’s handling of the HST.

Then there’s Christy Clark’s belated but significant role in the debacle, a saga of missed opportunity.

“One of the assets I bring to this campaign is a record of not having been involved with having foisted it onto people,” she announced not long after launching what proved to be a successful bid to succeed Campbell as Liberal leader and premier.

She flatly predicted that in the coming referendum the tax was “going to go down in flames.” Hence her musings that if she won the leadership in early 2011, she would put the HST to a thumbs up/thumbs down vote in the legislature and by implication, kill it right then and there. “Getting this out of the way as fast as we possibly can,” she called it. “It would put the HST behind us by March 31.”

There stands one of the great might-have-beens of recent political history. “I thought, let’s get the HST out of the way, and then let’s have an election,” as she acknowledged in an interview this time last year with Brian Hutchinson of the National Post.

So why didn’t she? “My caucus said, ‘Please, don’t do it.’ ... I listened. I took their advice.” None of them (with one exception) had supported her for the leadership. But she surrendered her will to theirs.

Instead of rolling the dice on a snap election, her government wasted six months and a $5 million advertising campaign, only to see the HST go down in flames in the August 2011 referendum, as she’d anticipated. Gone with it was any hope of a fresh start.

The New Democrats, notwithstanding their earlier disavowals of negative campaigning, intend to make political hay by underscoring how Clark and the Liberals are collectively responsible for the HST.

In reply, the Liberals can and do readily cite various NDP authored debacles from the 1990s. But the HST is a fresher and more painful memory for today’s electorate.

Amid the accumulated baggage of a dozen years in power, the B.C. Liberals would have faced an uphill fight for a fourth term in any event.

But the heaviest drag on their political fortunes is still the HST, the post-electoral double cross that first raised the notion that the Liberals needed to be punished with a stretch in Opposition.

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Vaughn Palmer: Liberal handling of HST the heaviest drag on their political fortunes

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